Inventions

For more than 200 years, New York State has been the home of world class innovations. For example, discover and celebrate the life of the “Father of Naval Aviation” at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport. For more than a century, Long Island has been the scene of important aerospace developments. The Cradle of Aviation Museum in East Garden City has 70 air and spacecraft in eight exhibit galleries -- one of most outstanding and diverse aerospace collections in the world.

The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens is the only museum in the United States dedicated to exploring the art, history and technology of the moving image through computer-based interactive exhibits, audio visual material, movie and TV artifacts and even video arcade and console systems available for play by visitors. In Rochester, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film tells the story of photography, motion pictures and Eastman himself - inventor, entrepreneur and founder of the Eastman Kodak Company.

In the Hudson Valley, visit Clermont, the home of Robert R. Livingston, who teamed up with Robert Fulton to develop the first commercially-viable steamboat (which became known by the same name as this ancestral home and estate). Locust Grove was the country home of telegraph pioneer Samuel F.B. Morse, and its museum pavilion tracks the early development of the telegraph. And learn about the legacy of perhaps the greatest inventor of them all, Thomas Edison, in Schenectady at the Museum of Innovation and Science (MySci).

Finally, what would America be without its most famous desert? Jell-O was developed in the late 1890s by a carpenter in LeRoy, New York. Today, the Jell-O Gallery Museum in LeRoy explores the history of this innovative brand.

Built in 1839, this Greek Revival house was the center of a busy and productive farm at mid-century operated by the Swan family, in residence from 1850-1890. Learn about the lives of the family and... more